A Study On The Translation Of English For Science And Technology (EST) From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

In recent years, with the rapid development of China and the advent of theinformation age, the scientific communications between China and the west becomemore and more frequent. China’s science and technology is playing an increasing vitalrole in the development of the world, which highlights the importance of Englishtranslation of science and technology.Grammatical metaphor is an important concept in the systematic functionallinguistics, and is a transference process from congruent form to metaphorical form.Halliday first put forward it in1985, and classified grammatical metaphor into twotypes: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor in terms of its metafunction.Based on the Halliday’s research, Martin and Thompson classified grammaticalmetaphor into three: ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor.When we translate one kind of language codes into another, it will lead to theemergence of congruent form and metaphorical form translation. But whethercongruent translation form or metaphorical translation form is more faithful to thefeatures of EST discourse such as objectiveness, formality and high lexical density intranslating is a problem worth noticing and researching. Meanwhile, on the basis of thereading of the related materials at home and abroad, the author of this thesis hasn’tfound any research on EST translation from the perspective of grammatical metaphor.Therefore, this thesis will analyze it and try to make a conclusion.The author of this thesis analyzes and demonstrates the metaphorical translationform more preferable to meet the features of EST discourse in the EST translating bycomparing some examples with same meaning. Specifically, this thesis analyzes thetranslation of English for Science and Technology from three sub-branches ofgrammatical metaphor respectively by the methods of analysis and induction. Firstly,the author will analyze and illustrate the using of metaphorical translation form in theEST translation can make the translatum more fit for the features of EST discourse from four aspects: process, functional elements, lexical and syntactic grammar as wellas lexical density. And then the author will illustrate that the using of imperative moodand the substitution of the modal verbs can accelerate the authorities and objectivenessof English for Science and Technology in its translation. Lastly, the author willdemonstrate that the using of metaphorical theme and metaphorical cohesive devices inEST translation can make the translatum more cohesive and they are preferableimportance.From above demonstration, the author make a conclusion that metaphoricaltranslation form is more faithful to the style of EST.To sum up, the using of the grammatical metaphor can not only maintain theformality and specialty of EST discourse but also keep the authority of EST. Althoughthis paper cannot contribute much to the established systematic theory of ESTtranslation, the author hopes it may throw some light on translation teaching andtranslation practice as well as have some theoretical significance for the contemporaryEST translation studies.